Pied Piper

For those of you who don't know, I am a music major at BSU. I originally began in 2002 as a performance major, which trains you to play in professional orchestras. It is the hardest and most intense music major there is. I attended BSU on a flute scholarship, auditioned, and was accepted into the performance program. My first semester was awesome, I made every audition that I tried out for, and loved my teacher. However the professional musician life style isn't necessarily the best if you want a family (I had always just planned on teaching private lessons, then later in life when all the kids are grown I could try out for the Boise Philharmonic or something). After my first semester everything went down hill. My teacher moved to Arkansas. Her husband lives down there, and plays in the Arkansas symphony....Don't ask me why you would take a job across the United States from your spouse. I really enjoyed her as a teacher, but...who would have thought....she wanted to live with her husband. My next flute teacher did not go over well, to put it nicely. She wasn't the nicest, wasn't very helpful, and I didn't really feel like I was learning anything. I got to the point where I didn't want to go, and didn't like playing, didn't want to touch my flute. Since I had 3-4 hrs of music stuff a day, It was miserable. Plus performance majors were required to practice 3 hrs a day on top of that. She was an awesome player, has played all over the world...but again her life style is...not married (she's probably in her 40's), and has lived in apartments her whole life. She moves around enough playing in orchestras, that she can't be settled. So I took a break for awhile. After a few years I decided to come back. I love my flute teacher. She has taught me more in the last 2 months than I think I have ever learned. When she found out that I took from the other teacher, she immediately asked me if it was the teacher that lead me away...She said that she has quite the mess to clean up from that teacher. There were a few others who stopped playing altogether, or were really behind. So I'm glad that I wasn't the only one. I'm glad that I took those few years off, because now I can really see how much I love playing, and practising. I think I love it more than even when I initially started BSU. Right now I am just going to go for a general music degree, I'm getting sort of close to finishing, I have 90 some odd credits and you have to have 128. On the down side I guess. Only going part time really drags it out. Then eventually when we are done having kids, and they are all in school I want to go back and get a masters in music education. I would love to teach elementary music, or elementary band...I know, not too many people aspire to be a band teacher.
Last night I was in a piece with the BSU orchestra called the Pied Piper. If you don't know the story, the pied piper was hired to get rid of rats, that infested the city of Hameln. He would play his fife..pipe..tin whistle..whatever you want to call it, which would attract the rats, and from there he would lead them all to the river to drown. After doing so the government didn't pay him what they owed him for the job. So as revenge he returned to the city, while everyone was in church. He played a song that only the children could hear. Like the rats, it lured the children to him. I've heard two different endings....one he lures them into a cave, to never be seen again, and the other he lures them into the river like the rats. Kinds of gruesome, I know. This piece was a concerto. We've all heard a soloist with a piano accompaniment. A concerto is a soloist with a full orchestra accompaniment. My flute professor was the soloist...the pied piper. I played one of the children. All of the children sat in the audience (of the big Morrison Center Hall). When she played the tune which lured the children to her, we, one by one started playing our flutes, arose from the audience and walked up to the stage, to the pied piper. We then played a little on stage, then as we played the tune again, we all followed her off stage (still playing) and out of the hall. It was a cool piece. I wish that I could have heard it form the audiences stand point, after we followed the pied piper out in the hall....we still played our tune out in the foyer....so the audience had a sense of the piper leading us away. If anyone is into that sort of music, it's called Pied Piper Fantasy by Corigliano. I didn't get a picture, but my flute teacher got a few, so I'll have her email me one so I can post it.